Hello, hellllooooooooo, friends and family and random people visiting because they saw us driving (probably very slowly) down the road in our big, blue bus! If you’re just visiting for the first time, my name is Sarah Q and along with my husband Henry, our three kiddos Roxy, Kai and Marley and our sweet pup Honey Buns, we are traveling the United States right now in our 1997 school bus turned tiny home on a wheels. We are technically home schoolers, but we prefer to call what we do “world schooling” because that’s how we think kids (and everybody!) learns best – by being out in the world, meeting new people, experiencing new places, hearing new ideas and having grand adventures. I started this website a while back and then promptly put it on a back burner, never really keeping it updated as much as I’ve wanted to. Life on the road with two businesses, three kids and an old finicky bus can be pretty hectic, but I really want to be better about keeping the blog updated, so leave me some comments! Tell me what you’d like to know more about! Have any questions for us? Any suggestions for places we should be sure to visit? I’d love to hear from you! We also have a Facebook page and an Instagram account and I’d love for you to follow along there, as well. Here are some links : The World School on Facebook. @theworldisourschool on Instagram.

Okay, time for an update! My last post was right after we finished putting down our plywood floor in the bus, which feels like FOREVER ago. Since then, we’ve finished : the walls, the ceiling, the electricity, the plumbing, the bathroom, the kitchen, the bunks, the shelves, the cabinets, the curtains, the decorations and just about everything else. We still have a few small projects to finish, but since getting out on the road, those projects seem so much less important than they did when we were stuck in my mom’s yard. Eventually, we’ll put up some trim and finish that last cabinet. For now, we’re traveling, loving life and enjoying our new home and everything feels perfectly imperfect and fine just the way it is.

So how about some photos?! I created a few before and after photos to show just how crazy the transformation has been. These side-by-sides make me feel so proud, so accomplished, so badass! You guys, WE DID THIS. All of it! We gutted the bus ourselves. We tore out all the seats. We ripped the metal ceiling and walls out and tore out all the disgusting old insulation. We built this home from the floor up – every 2×4, every piece of plywood, every nail and screw. We dreamed it, we designed it, we built it, with absolutely no building experience. I’ll be posting more about the process and some deeper thoughts about the entire experience, but for now … FINISHED BUS PHOTOS! (Note : I haven’t photographed the front of the bus or the bathroom, because I want to finish up a couple of projects there before showing them off, but I’ll do that soon! Promise!)

Welcome to The World School Bus Project daily blog! We’re a traveling, world schooling family of five who sold everything we owned to live life outside the box. Currently, we’re converting an old school bus into a tiny house on wheels for an amazing, open-ended road trip around the United States! Follow along by bookmarking this blog and liking us on Facebook and Instagram!

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OUR FLOOR IS FINISHED!!! ALL THE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!

The first few weeks of our bus project was all about ripping things apart. Tearing out the seats, getting rid of all the old insulation, pulling down the metal ceiling, grinding out a bazillion stubborn screws, and on and on and on. For a while it felt like we were basically ruining this thing that we had just spend thousands of dollars to buy and were supposed to be “fixing up.” The more we took out, the worse it looked. If you missed all our “before” pictures, click here! Finally, the demolition phase ended, and we got to work building ourselves a brand new floor!

The old floor (when it was still a school bus) was rubber glued to metal. Before we could start making a new floor, we had to tear out all the rubber, scrape up as much of the old glue as we could, convert all the rusted spots on the metal and then seal it with a coat of Rustoleum. Once all that was done, we started planning out what kind of floor we wanted to put down. Most RVs and “skoolie” conversions (school buses turned RV) use laminate flooring that looks like wood. We like the look of laminate, but it felt a little too boring and expected, so we decided to go with a painted plywood floor. Since the floor is metal, we knew we needed to put down a layer of insulation under the flooring, so we bought big sheets of rigid foam insulation and cut it to fit, the same way we would be cutting our plywood sheets to fit.

Once the insulation was down, we decided we didn’t like the way the big panel pieces looked very much and worried that we’d hate the plywood seams once they were down. When we put some of the plywood down, we realized we not only hated the seams, but it also bowed up at the ends – A LOT – which meant we’d have to screw into the metal floor to hold the panels down, something we definitely didn’t want to do. Luckily I’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours on Pinterest lately, looking for ideas for our conversion, and remembered seeing a tutorial for how to make a floor using plywood cut into long, wide slats. I showed Henry some photos and it didn’t take much convincing. We both loved the look of gappy plywood slats, painted and sealed, like the photo below (taken from the blog where I found the tutorial!)

Since we couldn’t put the slats directly over the insulation, we had to go back to Home Depot and buy ourselves some subfloor. We went with a cheaper, thinner, unsanded plywood than we were using for the slats, brought it back to the bus and cut it to fit over the insulation.

Once that was done, we got to work cutting our thicker, sanded plywood into 6″ slats. It took HOURS to measure and cut all the slats and I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single straight edge on any of them, but when we took them to the bus and laid them down, they looked AMAZING! I immediately knew this was the perfect floor for our bus and couldn’t wait to get them all nailed down!

First things first, though, each slat had to be sanded down on the edges and corners. Cut plywood has lots of splinters before you sand it down, so it’s not a step that can be skipped. The kids started sanding by hand, but got pretty bored after 15 minutes or so. That’s when Henry jumped in and finished them off with an electric sander.

To speed things along, I started nailing slats down as soon as Henry was finished sanding them. We started in the front of the bus and worked our way back. Because we’re cheap and didn’t want to spend money renting a nail gun, I used a plain ol’ hammer and nearly a thousand nails (seriously!) By the middle of the bus, my hammering hand was SO SORE, but I kept on going. (I also had two butt cheeks full of splinters from scooting around on the wood floors all day, but sorry, I totally forgot to take a butt photo. Damn!)

Things were going great until we got all the way to the back of the bus. That’s when I realized two of our subfloor boards had shifted and were wedged under the subfloor boards in front of them. The shift was tiny – only about a quarter of an inch – but since I had nailed about 20 boards to the subfloor pieces they were underneath, we couldn’t get them out without pulling up every single board in the back. I was exhausted, Henry was exhausted, we were so close to finishing and now we were having to pull up our amazing floor?! UGH. We were so tired and frustrated by this point, we decided to quit for the night and come back the next day.

This morning we showed up, ready to get this damn floor finished, and FINISH WE DID! It took a while to get all the bent and broken nails out of the boards we pulled up, but once that was done, it was smooth sailing. We fixed the shifted subfloor, nailed all the boards back down, did a quick trim job on one board that was sticking out a bit too far, and then … WE WERE DONE! (Well, except for painting and sealing. That stuff will happen after we’ve finished framing and building all our furniture!)

Three days, four achy hands and knees, lots of splinters and sore thumbs (from our super-impressive hammering skills) … all for one handmade, perfectly imperfect, exactly-as-we-wanted, character-filled wood slat floor. I love it so much and I’m so excited to build our home on top of it!

Oh, and just because before and afters are THE BEST. Here’s a side-by-side of what our floor looked like last week and what it looks like today! I’d say that’s a pretty bad ass upgrade!!

kalissa -omfg*!*!*!* it looks ah-maze-zing!!! fantabulous dah’ling! all ur hard work is really beginning to show! keep it up and I shall cu at work again soon. thanx so much for telling me about ur site. I really love what u and ur family is doing. love kalissaReplyCancel

Welcome to The World School Bus Project daily blog! We’re a traveling, world schooling family of five who sold everything we owned to live life outside the box. Currently, we’re converting an old school bus into a tiny house on wheels for an amazing, open-ended road trip around the United States! Follow along by bookmarking this blog and liking us on Facebook and Instagram!

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YOU GUYS! WE (ALMOST) HAVE A FLOOR!!

But first, let me fill you in on what we’ve been doing for the past two weeks!

First, let me remind you how terrible our bus was looking two weeks ago. YIKES! We’re supposed to LIVE in this thing?!

Henry finished pulling up what was left of the rubber floor in the driver’s area. Not surprisingly, we found LOTS of rust underneath! There’s also a giant hole, which I assume gives access to the engine somehow. We’ll be patching it up, but keeping it accessible.

RUST SUCKS

We also finished scraping the ceiling down. There was a layer of dried glue from behind the insulation that we pulled out, so at first we thought the ceiling didn’t have any rust. A little bit of scraping exposed several panels full of it, though. See that panel on the left below? After scraping, the right photo is what it looked like! It was like a scratch off lottery ticket … with a really crappy prize.

After doing lots of research, we decided to use a “rust converter” instead of grinding down or sandblasting the rust away. We used a product called Corroseal, which worked great! Here’s a description of the product from Corroseal’s website : “Rust occurs naturally when the iron in steel oxidizes and returns to its original state, iron oxide. Through an innovative chemical conversion process, Corroseal Rust Converter converts rust (iron oxide) into a stable substance, magnetite. It also primes the surface with a high quality latex metal primer at the same time.” Below you can see the process. The top left photo is the rusty panel. Top right is what it looks like after the Corroseal is brushed on. Bottom left is what it looks like once the rust has started to turn black and the Corroseal is drying. Below right is what it looks like the next day. All the non-rusty spots look the same, but all the rusted spots have turned completely black and are hard as a rock! Pretty cool!

Before we could apply the Corroseal to the floor, though, we had to get it as clean as possible. To do this, we bought an industrial strength cleaner and degreaser and put the kids to work! Kai was miserable and only scrubbed for a few minutes, but Roxy was a trooper! She scrubbed and scrubbed the floor until all the gunk was off. It still looked terrible, but it was as clean as it was going to get!

The original rubber flooring was stuck down with brown glue that REFUSED to come up, no matter how hard we scrubbed. Henry busted out the angle grinder and started taking it off that way, but then we realized we were being ridiculous and that the floor didn’t need to be spotless since we were about to cover it up with all new flooring, so he quit. See how shiny it would have been if we had kept on grinding, though? So pretty!

Once the floors were clean(ish) Roxy got to work painting Corroseal onto all the floor rust. Since rust is brown and the old glue is brown, it was sometimes hard to tell which was which. Since we had a lot of Corroseal left, I told Rox to put it anywhere that was brown, just to be safe.

As it dried, the Corroseal started to work and turned black! I realize now I didn’t get a photo of the entire bus and it’s black floor. Oh, well! Just know it worked like a charm!

PATCHING HOLES IN THE FLOOR!

Soooooo, this photo is out of order. I took this a couple of weeks ago before we cleaned and sealed the floors and tried a little patch of it to make sure it would work. It worked GREAT so we went back to Home Depot and bought a bunch more. After the floor was cleaned, we spent about two hours filling every tiny (and not so tiny) hole with this stuff. So what is it, you ask? It’s putty! See that photo on the right where it looks like I stuck gum over the holes? That “gum” is actually squished up SteelStick putty and after just 60 minutes, it was hard as a rock! Once dried, you can sand it, paint it, even drill into it. This stuff is amazing. I highly recommend it! Our floor had a million holes in it from all the seat bolts. Now our floor has ZERO holes in it! Cheers to NO MORE RUST FORMATION!

REMOVED, CLEANED AND RERESEALED THE WINDOWS!

I LOVE WINDOWS. So many Skoolie (school bus) converters take the windows out or cover them with walls. I’ve been trying really hard to figure out ways to keep the majority of our windows unobstructed so that we’ll have plenty of sunshine coming in during the day, but the more I research, the more I realize why people are taking them out. School bus windows LEAK LIKE CRAZY. I wish I had a good picture to show you the stupid design of these windows. The problem really lies in the space between the windows (and not so much the windows themselves.) There’s a big gap on the bottom corner of every single window that has to be filled with caulk or water will seep in and drop down the metal ribs, onto the floor or into the side panel insulation. Not good! Luckily we had a rain day recently, which gave us the chance to find the windows that weren’t sealed up completely and mark them. We still plan to keep as many windows as possible, so to make sure they won’t leak, we pulled them all out, scraped all the old caulk off and re-sealed them with brand new, clear caulk! Fingers crossed for NO MORE LEAKS!

While the windows were out, we gave the kids sponges and soap and put them to work scrubbing them down. Marley (with her GIANT gloves) had a blast!

We borrowed a scraper tool to get the old caulk out of the windows, so I went ahead and walked around the bus and removed the old decals. I had read that removing the decals was sometime really difficult, but our decals came right off with minimal effort! Yay for easy!

INSULATING THE FLOOR!

School buses are made of metal. Metal gets COLD. Metal also gets HOTTTTT. Because of these two things, all the Skoolies you see will be full of as much insulation as possible! Since our home base is in Texas, our main concern is keeping heat out and we hope to do that by coating our roof with elastomeric paint and a cushy and thick roof insulation. We don’t plan to live or travel to anywhere snowy in our bus, though, so our floor insulation doesn’t need to be super thick. It does need to be sturdy, though, so we decided to use half inch thick 4x8ft rigid foam insulation panels. These panels are basically just styrofoam, so they’re safe to handle and easy to cut. Before we started cutting, though, we had to do some math! Marley and Rox were off playing, so I grabbed Kai and gave him a little lesson on how to convert feet to inches. He picked it up super quick and was so proud of himself! Once we finished all our measurements, we filled the floor with perfectly cut pieces of insulation!

WORLD SCHOOL RECESS

After making all our cuts, we had lots of scrap pieces of styrofoam. The kids were thrilled when we told them they could cut them up and make whatever they wanted. Henry helped Kai make an awesome airplane. After “flying” their plane to death, they decided to make weapons to fight with and spent the rest of the day having very dramatic “battles.” World School recess is the BEST!

PLYWOOD FLOOR!

What went wrong with PLAN A : Plywood sheets don’t just lay down. They bow. A LOT. We really don’t want to put any more holes in the floor since we just spent hours filling the old holes and getting rid of the floor rust those holes caused, so screwing them into the floor is not an option. Another problem with this plan is that I’ve been spending way too much time on Pinterest and found something I like better … WOOD SLATS!

PLAN B : Put down a layer of insulation. Put down big plywood sheets. On top of those big plywood sheets, lay down long plywood slats. Nail the top and bottom layers together so they lay flat. Paint the slats white. Have an amazing, vintage-y, rustic-chic floor!

Waiting for a list of what went wrong with PLAN B? TOO BAD! PLAN B is THE BOMB DOT COM and it’s going great so far (yes, I realize I probably just jinxed myself.) We got all the plywood underlayment cut and placed and all the top plywood cut into 6″ wide slats. All that’s left now is to glue the top and bottom layers together (with Liquid Nails) and then nail them together with small finishing nails. Henry is a little bit worried that the finishing nails will work themselves out when the bus is jiggling around on the road, and he’s probably right, but there’s no turning back now. I’m LOVING how it’s coming together and am so excited to see it finished!

The underlayment boards placed …

How it’s looking so far, with the slats placed randomly throughout the bus. We should finish placing the boards and gluing them down tomorrow! I’ll be sure to post an update as soon as it’s finished!

Whew! That was a LONG update! Want to be sure and catch the next one? Go followus on Facebook and Instagram!

Welcome to The World School Bus Project daily blog! We’re a traveling, world schooling family of five who sold everything we owned to live life outside the box. Currently, we’re converting an old school bus into a tiny house on wheels for an amazing, open-ended road trip around the United States! Follow along by bookmarking this blog and liking us on Facebook and Instagram!

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GUTTED!

Nearly two weeks into our bus project and we’ve finally finished* ripping all it’s guts out! This bus has never looked worse, you guys. If this is how the bus looked when we first saw it, I would have said “hell to the no,” (which is stupid because it would have saved us two weeks of hard work.) As ugly as it is, though, we’re still in love with our bus and are excited to be done with demolition and start cleaning, removing the rust, re-sealing and getting ready to build! First, a few “before” pictures …

Told you it’s looking ugly! Man, I can not WAIT to pair some of these “before” photos up with “after” photos! We have such big plans for this bus, you guys! I know it looks ridiculously awful right now, but this bus is going to be TRANSFORMED! (And aren’t you excited you get to see it all happening in “real time?!”)

SIDE PANELS

Now, if you’re a blog reader who happens to know a thing or two about school bus conversions (hello Skoolie friends!) you might have noticed the side panels are still in all those “before” photos. That’s because those bitches DID NOT want to come out! Henry spent all day today working on them, grinding out all the stuck screws and trying to pry the panels away from the wall. He even took out some windows to see if that would make it easier (nope!) We finally decided that instead of pulling the entire panel off, we’re going to get some a metal cutter and cut the panels off right under the windows. That’s tomorrow’s project and we’re pretty sure it’ll work, so hopefully those will be out first thing in the morning.

If you’re not a blog reader who knows about bus conversions and are wondering why we’re taking those metal panels off, it’s because there’s another layer of insulation back there that we want to remove and replace. The insulation from behind the metal ceiling panels was old, smelly and moldy in places and we’re expecting the side insulation to be pretty much the same. Before we start putting in our wood slat walls, we want to put in all fresh, new insulation and make sure any rust underneath is taken care of.

Here are some photos of Henry battling the side panels from earlier tonight …

I’m a photographer, soooooooo …

While Henry was hard at work, dealing with the panels, I was being a typical photographer, looking for a way to make all this ugly into something pretty. All of the photos below are random, ugly spots in our bus! SEE! You can literally find beauty ANYWHERE you look!How’s that for some mid-week inspiration?